Read Online Sadie-In-Waiting by Annie Jones - Free Book Online Page B

April’s birth father. Even if they did allow themselves to broach the subject, they wouldn’t have had much to say. They had a name, David Bock, and the information that he and their mother had met in college, and when he’d found out about April’s impending birth, he’d disappeared. Moonie and Mama had married when April was a toddler, and he was the only father she had ever known.
    So who was Sadie to throw the past in her sister’s face, when all she wanted was the same chance at being bedeviled by Daddy that she and Hannah claimed.
    “I’m taking Daddy and that’s that.” April’s eyes flashed, but when she spoke, emotion did not rule the moment. “Because he took care of me when Mom left. I know he’s not really my father, not biologically, but he’s still my daddy .”
    It was the kind of argument no human being with even a hint of a heart could have stood up against.
    “So it’s settled. Daddy lives with me.” April clapped her hands together, and smiled big as all get out at her sisters. “Which leaves my two favorite siblings free to explore the new avenues stretching out before them and the many new blessings—”
    “You mean bugaboos,” Hannah corrected.
    Sadie held up one finger. “I prefer brouhahas.”
    April folded her arms and finished with a confidence Sadie, for one, certainly did not share, “…the many new blessings that await, if they only have the courage and faith to go after them.”

Chapter Six
    “H ope y’ all are ready for this.” With both hands in oven mitts, Sadie gripped her best platter, one of the few things she owned known to have belonged to her mother.
    She swallowed hard to chase away the lump rising in her throat but that did nothing to abate the gnawing conflict warring within her. Should she or should she not waltz into the dining room belting out “On Top of Spaghetti”?
    She drew in a deep breath from the steaming mountain of pasta in homemade marinara sauce that had taken the better part of the day to prepare. The swinging door that divided the professionally updated kitchen from the do-it-yourself disaster of a dining room creaked softly under the weight of her leaning back against it. Who was she kidding? Taking the light road with a cornball song had no place on the menu this evening.
    Tuesday evening. Every Tuesday since—well, for so long Sadie had forgotten when it actually began—had been family night. No eating at friends’. No grabbing fast food after a soccer game. No pizza ordered in so everyone could cart a slice off to eat in front of the TV or computer.No sandwiches gobbled down on the way out the door to a school play or choir practice. No slow-cooking something to dish up whenever whoever showed up, showed up.
    For the Pickett family, Tuesday night had Reserved stamped all over it in big red letters. Granted, they’d gotten lax about it lately. The past nine or ten weeks, Sadie thought. Maybe…maybe six months? Okay, they hadn’t had an honest-to-goodness-family-night meal for over a year.
    But tonight was different.
    She had reminded Ed and the kids no less than three times each that this Tuesday they would be getting back into the old habit and eating as a family again. On this last night before she started her new job, she had some things she needed to get off her chest.
    “Better enjoy this. It may be the last really big family meal I fix for y’all for a while.” Using her hips for leverage, she set the door swinging open.
    “Because, you know, after tonight, things are going to change around here.” She strode into the dining room and stared at the empty chairs she had known would greet her. “Or not.”
    Sadie plunked the platter down at the end of the table and surveyed her very private little kingdom bathed in warm late-afternoon light.
    Overhead, the ceiling fan Ed had installed after a fourteen-hour workday, whirred, sputtered, whined, then whirred again.
    Layer upon layer of half a century’s worth of bad taste